Solution Type: Documentation
Industry: General Manufacturing
Client Challenge:
Our client has several topics and concerns around process efficiencies, speed to market improvements and resource / knowledge retention for the New Product Development team (NPD). There is also a desire to reduce delivery time while maintaining or potentially even improving on current high level of quality and operational challenges regarding knowledge retention and the impact of losing institutional knowledge when engineering resources exit.
Solution:
Provide relevant strategic recommendations in order to define options and alternative approaches that our client can utilize to establish a prioritized plan to work toward improving time to market, maintaining or improving quality, and improving staff retention.
Result:
Provided assessment and recommendations
We had the following quick-hit recommendations.
- Creation of a detailed role and responsibility document for engineers.
- This would improve efficiencies and reduce the time of tracking down who needs to do what and when.
- An overall job description which would provide a general description of an individual’s role and responsibility minimizing confusion
- A project-specific role and responsibility document detailing out all team members’ roles and responsibility
- Holistic resource planning involving all projects showing effort and duration estimates overlaying current workloads would provide accurate projections and the ability to set expectations for Senior Management
- Schedule the engineers to visit each of the plants to gain some exposure and experience with different plant environments and the challenges with manufacturing each facility has experienced.
- Devise a training exercise, requiring Engineers to visit various manufacturing facilities during prototyping or upon launch of a new closure system to observe equipment and process modifications
- Team members need experience where closures are manufactured. Spending time in only controlled settings such as R&D labs, test areas, and in the virtual world does not always provide the necessary experience needed. The team needs to understand Design for Manufacturing and that requires time spent on the manufacturing floor.